Individual Problems, Individual Solutions

This zine grapples with a socio-economic structure which tends to persuade working people to interpret their problems as merely personal – that their addictions, impoverishment, anxieties, and loneliness are all do to their own individual flaws or lack of “will power” or “work ethic”. This piece pushes back against that ideology, giving a variety of evidence that these discontents are the results of structural problems, and must be confronted as such. In this writing, I explore how these “individuated” critiques play out in our culture, especially in the subcultural spaces that aspire to fight against injustice, in hopes of empowering working people and relieve regular folks of a shame that has been dubiously placed upon them.